


For what else is the life of man

by passcod



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, I promise, Mentions of genocide, Unreliable Narrator, it just might not be the plot you're used to, more worldbuilding than plot to start with, sea shanty, the plot shows up later, there's gonna be more characters but i'll tag them when they show up, zuko carefully doesn't think about things, zuko doesn't think he's yelling it's just aggressive negotiations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:55:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29254794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passcod/pseuds/passcod
Summary: Zuko has a terrible idea. The Avatar hadn't been seen for a hundred years. Nobody knew what he looked like. His mission was basically impossible. (He spent a lot of time not thinking about this.) But what if you could make the Avatar come out? You'd have to do something absolutely outrageous. It was a terrible idea. It would never work.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	1. You do not even agree with yourself

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this mostly because I was tired of most Atla fics being more or less basically the same six ideas. Not that there's no good ones. But I wanted something a bit different, and you gotta be the change you want to see etc etc.
> 
> This may be edited and/or abandoned halfway. I really should be writing my other Star Wars fic, but instead I'm writing this. Ah well.

The Earth Kingdom merchant Zuko was questioning was proving too much trouble to be worth it. That was probably because Zuko was also attempting to negotiate for hay at the same time and was affecting an upper class Ba Sing Se noble's attendant's demeanour instead of wearing his red and black Fire Nation Prince attire and armour. On one hand, the market hadn't cleared itself before he even reached it and the merchant hadn't spent their entire interaction babbling nervously or being silently terrified; on the other, the bale prices weren't as low as he'd usually get and he'd had to actually make small talk, a frankly obscene amount of small, inconsequential talk, to get anywhere.

On top of that, the merchant really hadn't known that the stack of baubles he was selling as a side gig contained Air Nomad antiques. He had actually been given them in barter at an earlier stop inland, on the Ganshu trading road between Baiying and Omashu. Their price had immediately risen, giving Zuko the opportunity to back out of pretend-negotiating for them and instead add a bale of hay to his purchase. When the merchant wondered why he was so interested in knowing about the Air Nomads, Zuko had suddenly looked outside, said something inane about the length of shadows, and swiftly exited, tossing a coin-string behind him as deposit for the goods.

However, as he'd moved around the mercantile port to complete his ship's resupply, he'd thought about that question. It was silly. The hay merchant hadn't meant anything by it. Yet Zuko's mind had latched onto it and was running with it. Why. Why was he looking for Air Nomads?

Yes, almost a century ago the airbenders had declared they'd identified the new Avatar, and then Fire Lord Sozin had ordered their murder. Zuko had been at the temples, he'd put the bones to rest. The Fire Nation may now be pursuing the goal of unifying the world, bringing modern living to all the remote backward savage tribes out there, and pacifying the barbarians and pirates, but the war had started from genocide. No amount of propaganda changed the sight of fire-bent cribs in Air Temple nurseries, of small skeletons still entwined with each other at the back of classrooms. The grass regrew in the playgrounds, but the horror still hung there.

Yes, the old records showed master benders lived longer, especially before the war. It wasn't inconceivable that the Avatar was over a hundred years old. Accounts of Kyoshi's own extended life were... not as consistent as he'd have liked, but the Avatar hadn't been seen in a century. In fact, the Avatar hadn't been seen since Avatar Roku, as presumably the only people who had seen the airbender who would then be identified as the Avatar were all dead. It wasn't inconceivable that the Avatar was in hiding, and had all this time fought for balance, as was his role, from hiding. That was Zuko's guiding theory.

The other theory he entertained, as had Fire Lord Azulon, was that the airbender Avatar had been killed in the genocide and reborn in the Water Tribes. Hence the anti-bender raids. Oh, outwardly this was a pre-emptive strike against the water nations, imprisoning (or more likely executing, Zuko had looked at the prison manifests and not found quite nearly enough waterbenders in them for the letter of the orders to have been followed) their most powerful force, militarily-speaking. But as Prince, he had access to more archives than almost anyone else, even banished, and deep in the minutes of an advisor meeting, he'd found traces that Fire Lord Azulon had been worried about a Water Tribe Avatar.

And what Fire Lord Azulon was worried about, he ordered murdered. Zuko had experience with that.

So Zuko was looking for a really old Air Avatar, or an old Water Avatar, or possibly maybe a middle-aged or young adult Earth Avatar. He knew there was no Fire Avatar, because Fire Lord Azulon had enacted policies to catch that very possibility, a battery of tests several times in the life of every Fire Nation child from toddler to adult, nominally to assess bending and educational achievements, but in truth to find a Fire Avatar should one be born anywhere in territories they controlled. That, too, he'd found in meeting minutes.

And there laid the issue, he reflected on while getting ritually flattened at Pai Sho in his Uncle's cabin. _He_ knew there were no Fire Avatar. But no one else did. And to anyone else who thought about the Avatar, which wasn't many people, but why should they, the timeline fit. A hundred years since, still no word. If the Air Avatar died during the genocide, and the Water Avatar died during the raids, and the Earth Avatar died during one of the many campaigns against Earth Kingdom, perhaps even during the Ba Sing Se March, when General Junzi had led a force from the western seaboard, cutting through Earth Kingdom land and crashing against the walls of Ba Sing Se, laying waste to vast swathe of the countryside and several minor cities a decade before General Iroh's similarly ill-fated siege of the capital…

To some, it might just look like the Fire Nation was supported by the spirits, overall successfully waging war on every other nation at once, with a secret Avatar on their side. That would certainly explain the reactions he'd gotten when searching for the Avatar in that Chin village.

The Avatar was most likely in hiding. Looking for clues wasn't going anywhere. As he let Ensign Ma help him out of his armour, he considered the possibility of instead drawing out the Avatar. Few things came to mind that could have a chance to succeed: most offensive action had already been undertaken during the war, Zuko had no knowledge of any credible allies of the Avatar to find and hold, it was impossible to further desecrate the Air Temples should he even have the stomach to. No, drawing them out wasn't feasible. Unless...

He let sharp burst of laughter go, and heard the guard outside his door stumble. Whoops. Where was he? Oh, his cabin, and it was dark outside, and they were still at dock. He'd gone through the entire day without really paying attention to anything but his thoughts. Well. He hoped he hadn't said or been told anything that would come back to bite him later. Zuko opened his door, raised an eyebrow at the guard's surprised jump, and requested Lieutenant Jee meet him in the morning. He could catch up then. No, no, not Jee, he immediately changed his mind and recalled the soldier, what was the name of Jee's new assistant, Second Lieutenant Yuan, that would do. No point further lowering Lieutenant Jee's impression of him.

Current affairs taken care of, back to his thoughts. And he almost discarded the idea right then. It was ridiculous. Where would he even find someone willing to act thus? He could order one of his subordinates to… but they would need to pretend to go against the Fire Nation for it to work. It would never work. He couldn't find a civilian and threaten them either, and all benders would either refuse or be part of the military. And the age! They would have to be younger than most benders he knew had the skills to be able to pass… really there was one possibility, and she was much too brutal and fanatic and most importantly probably wanted him dead. He tried to not think about that. No. Alright. No. He discarded the entire outrageous, futile, hopeless train of thought.

Tomorrow, he'd catch up with Second Lieutenant Yuan, drink tea with his Uncle, throw a dart at the metaphorical map, and visit another spirits-forsaken Earth Kingdom fishing village on their way to the Eastern Air Temple. Back to the hunt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> zuko: ahah i have seen past the fire nation's propaganda. i know about the airbenders' and waterbenders' demises  
> zuko: i am enlightened. ne'er shall i be taken in by our lies again  
> zuko: anyway so let's colonise some savages


	2. To call a spade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko visits the library.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed the rank and title of the officer who's the assistant to Lieutenant Jee last chapter, to make it fit the worldbuilding I'm doing rather than stealing it from another fic, and to fit navy titles rather than army.
> 
>   * Previously: Lieutenant-Corporal Riko 
>   * Now: Second Lieutenant Yuan 
> 


The Fire Nation burned their dead. They made pyres when at all possible, but the important part was to become part of the flame, to rejoin Agni in her temple of light. The Earth Kingdom buried their dead. They wrapped them in cloth made from plants, interred them in soil, then seeded new life above such that they may honour the Mother and ceded their bones to the earth such that they may appease the Rock. The Water Tribes sank their dead. They faced the sea to watch them go in the embrace of La, and waited for the moon to rise and for Tui to take on their vigil.

The Air Nomads were nomads. Before they built their four temples, they would fly around the world, and trade, and live, and die. They adopted the customs of the places they stopped in. Even after they retired to live and travel almost exclusively between their temples, they kept traditions from every culture, adapted, combined.

The Air Nomads burned, buried, sank, and dispersed their dead. Bodies would be cremated, bones buried under orchards, and ashes cast to the winds for one final flight before joining the waves.

Zuko hadn't known this when he'd lain the dead of the Western Temple to rest the best way he knew. But the Eastern Temple's Library hadn't been breached. In the middle of the shelves, of the hundreds of scrolls, there was one skeleton still wrapped in tunics, still holding a scroll on their lap, and a pen in the other. The inkwell aside them had long since evaporated. The last entry was their name, Lidaw Masisi, entered of their own hand in their own Book of the Dead.

Zuko had delicately lifted the parchment and rolled it back, discovering hundreds of names under one date, and thousands before that, all the way to the Era of Wan. Scripts devolved and changed, until he could only recognise the dates, and then only the years. In the most recent margins, a plea was scrawled, for whoever would find them, to take care of their dead in their fashion, as described, as the author did not have the strength to open the gates, and could not go outside to attend to their brethren. The message continued, but was blurred and smudged beyond recognition.

Zuko had run out of the librarian's death chamber, and stopped his uncle from more firebender cremation. They could make fire hot enough to powder bones, but the nomads hadn't. He could do nothing but scatter the ashes of the already gone, but he could bury the rest. The ashes of the bodies had long since been blown away by the winds, as the dead air nomads would have wished.

Digging graves and planting fruits was labourious work. It took a lot longer this time than for the Western Temple, but at last every monk, nun, and child, so many children, was laid to final rest.

He returned to the Temple Library the next day. The histories, he read, but left in place. The philosophical treaties, he sampled, and selected some for Uncle. But the real treasure was the bending scrolls. Not only about air, but all kinds, for all elements, from all over the world, and spread over centuries.

Under the royal palace in Caldera City, he knew, were the Fire Nation's own archive of non-fire bending. Once, they'd been in the main library, available for anyone to consult. Fire Lord Sozin had ordered them destroyed, but the librarians had merely moved them. By the time Fire Lord Azulon had taken the throne, the location's secret had been lost. It had been rediscovered only a few years before Zuko's banishment. Fire Lord Ozai had promptly made their existence a state secret, and set a team to study and exploit them. Zuko, avoiding Azula one day, had spent four hours perched on top of a shelf, listening to the scholars and waiting for them to leave so he could escape his predicament.

In this Temple's stacks, the four elements were represented, as well as several different martial styles, and a section marked "spirits" which sat empty but for a small tablet of stone inscribed "on loan" in the standard script. On loan to whom? If there was a ledger, he couldn't find it.

In between the air and fire sections, there was a single unmarked shelf, carved and coloured with both the white eddies of airbending and the red curling huō of firebending. It had few scrolls and leafbounds, but no loan markers. Unrolling one, Zuko found an ancient script he couldn't read, and illustrations of very acrobatic firebending katas and some flame-less sequences that, without understanding the associated prose, he assumed were moving meditations. He shrugged and grabbed a few scrolls, and moved on.

Between fire and earth, earth and water, water and air, he found similar shelves. The earth, air, water, and earth water shelves held much more each than all the fire and fire air shelves combined. Zuko felt a bit miffed at the thought that fire clearly was not seen as very interesting by these monks of the Eastern Temple, and sad, too. Perhaps, had they known more, more would have survived. He scoffed at his own sentimentality and lifted a smattering of works from all over to study.

With one last look inside, he strode from the library and summoned the hottest, most concentrated hōn fire he could, welding the stone door to its frame, then pulled on the climbing ivy to mask the shape of it. He would know where it is, and it had little chance of resisting an earthbender or even a dedicated scavenger, but it should remain sealed against storm and scourge, human or not.

On his ship, Zuko studied the maps he'd appropriated from this latest temple, and reported their details, names, and coastal profiles onto his own world chart. The search for the Southern Temple a few months back had yielded nothing, and he hoped finding the Eastern Temple would provide clues as to its true location. If nothing else came out of his quest and journey, he aspired to have his maps form the new standard of the Fire Nation, and then the world's, understanding of geography. If he never found the Avatar, and either perished or wasted out in the world in his banishment, at least his works, and maybe his name, would survive him.

The Air Nomads ought to have had the best maps, seeing as they flew everywhere, they would have seen the world as the birds did, a view of the lands and seas unaffected by changing landscapes and shifting points of view. Yet they had precious few maps, that Zuko could find, or even read mention of. He suspected they had a different way of recording places, but there remained no one to explain.

Having identified another archipelago that was until then absent from all existing charts, he got up, ignored his uncle calling for him to play his Pai Sho turn, and went to consult with Helmsman Fu and Chartswoman Wu on whether they'd sailed through them already or if their course had taken them past without sighting the islands.

"Ah, Captain, look," Wu held the logbook in one hand and traced the logchart with the other.

"We held this bearing from the Zhaoxian islands, up until Hualu Cape, which would put us right next the closest of these on the fifth day of navigation... but only close enough to see them on open seas during a short period of time."

"Aha, indeed." Fu pulled a bead-stack tool from beneath his seat and started calculating, pausing slightly when Zuko murmured "between third and sixth hour of darkness." 

"Exactly so, my prince," he confirmed shortly after. "But from the tables, the moon would have been almost half full..." 

Wu leafed through another log: "Cloudy evening and stormy morning, we wouldn't have had much light even then."

Zuko held back a sigh (not entirely successfully, given both Wu and Fu turned slightly in response), thanked them both, and ordered a course plotted for the archipelago.

"But keep us close to Earth Kingdom coast for the first third of the trip," he added. That would aid his mapping, and if there was a large enough fishing village, they always could use more supplies and information.

Remembering his impending Pai Sho defeat, he slump-stomped to the command quarters, and resolved to finish quickly so he could practice some of the ancient meditation katas he'd found earlier. They looked… energetic. He was feeling restless, and getting flattened at a game didn't really do anything to help tire him down. This would. He hoped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Worldbuilding that probably won't show up all that detailed:
> 
> **Fire Navy ranks**
> 
>   * Admiral 
>   * Captain 
>   * Commander 
>   * Lieutenant-Commander 
>   * Lieutenant 
>   * Second Lieutenant 
>   * Ensign 
>   * Cadet 
>   * Seaman 
>   * Apprentice 
> 

> 
> **Fire Army ranks**
> 
>   * General 
>   * Colonel 
>   * Major 
>   * Captain 
>   * Lieutenant 
>   * Second Lieutenant 
>   * Cadet 
>   * Sergeant 
>   * Corporal 
>   * Private 
> 

> 
> Zuko is a Captain, Iroh is a Commander on the ship and was a General when in the army, Zhao is currently a Captain but would get promoted to Admiral in canon events. Zuko's ship is too small to have a Lieutenant-Commander, so Jee is the highest ranked officer below ship command.
> 
> I've also [tweeted some other worldbuilding](https://twitter.com/passcod/status/1360414963706208257), subject to change until next chapter, which will have in-story exposition of some flame types.


	3. Exhaustion when brought to a fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zuko knew he wasn't good enough. Oh, passable, yes. Enough to yield the flames on his own. Enough to beat off pirates and hold his own against bandits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This contains a somewhat modified sea shanty, which you all probably thought you were safe from now that it's past the start of the year and the shanty frenzy seems to have died down. Never fear! It's only the central element of the chapter.

> Sing Ho! for a brave and valiant barque  
>  and a brisk and lively loū,  
>  a loyal crew and a captain too,  
>  to carry me over the seas,  
>  to carry me over the seas, my boys,  
>  to my true love so gay,  
>  he has taken a trip on a darker ship,  
>  far from Agni and me, away. 
> 
> So blow on the jun, Heigh Ho,  
>  a-roving I will go,  
>  I'll sleep no more on nation's shore,  
>  double furnace shift'll be my way,  
>  I'll start the morning zā,  
>  I'll stoke the nightly pā,  
>  every breath a hei, every step one less day,  
>  til together anew you and I both stay. 
> 
> My true love, he is beautiful,  
>  my true love, my guon,  
>  his eyes as blue as ngai moū— 

"Captain on deck!"

Aw. "As you were."

But the song did not recover. Zuko understood why, the song spoke of star-crossed lovers at best and of bribery and treason at worst. Not really something you sung in the presence of royalty, no matter how banished. Still. One day he hoped to learn of all the lyrics.

What he found most intriguing was the resemblance to a traditional childhood rhyme used to teach the different types of fire and flames. Did the bawdy shanty come first, or did the schooling song? And who had the bright idea to convert one to the other, regardless? He wondered as he wandered, and posed the question to Uncle once safely ensconced in his cabin. The older man hmmd and ahhd, but Zuko was not fooled: he knew, but he wanted to exchange the information against… something?

"What is it you want, Uncle?" he sighed. If this was in any way related to Pai Sho, he would rather keep wondering.

Iroh's eyes twinkled. Zuko's eyebrow twitched.

"And how far did you hear the song, dear nephew?"

Yeah, no. There was no way he would be repeating any of it.

"Up to the mention of ngai moū," he offered cautiously.

"Mmmmm. Well, nephew, I will tell you if practice each mentioned flame's traditional form, in order…"

Zuko perked up: that wasn't so bad!

"…on the deck."

He took it back. Did uncle want him to humiliate himself with a poor, lacklustre, imperfect performance? Zuko knew he wasn't good enough. Oh, passable, yes. Enough to yield the flames on his own. Enough to beat off pirates and hold his own against bandits. But the Eternal Dance? No matter how much he'd practiced, Azula always had been better, always had received tutor praise, and been allowed to perform for an audience.

Also that didn't sound like his uncle (but maybe his faith was misplaced) and so it must be a way to say no without saying no because his uncle could never say things in a straightforward manner. Alright then. He opened his mouth to deny the request and end the bargaining without more fanfare when Iroh added:

"I will have to forgo our Pai Sho game tonight so you may rest after, of course."

That was _not_ fair.

"Until the next moon." he pretended to negotiate. There was no way Uncle would accept losing out on tormenting him with Pai Sho for the next ten days.

"Are you saying you will be so very wretched you will be incapable of doing anything for this long, nephew?"

"Of course not! I… Well, five nights, then."

"Five? Perhaps we should consult with the physician regarding your h—"

"No! That will not be necessary. Three days."

"Ah! Very well, nephew. I will arrange for the aft to be cleared with Lieutenant Jee."

Wait what? Aaargh.

Zuko made no effort to suppress a groan and stomped out of the room. What had they even been negotiating for? Well. Apparently he was doing this. He'd need proper apparel.

* * *

The Eternal Dance was not particularly complex, Zoku reflected while walking sombrely to his fate. After all, it was one of the first series of exercises taught to all children, firebenders or not. The difficulty of performing the Dance came from the purity of the forms and the transitions between them. Each set reflected a particular kind of flame, and to execute it perfectly, you had to bend that particular flame, and no other. Then, you had to smoothly transition the flame to another, and at the same time flow the physical movements into the next flame's shapes.

But that was not all: the hardest part of a performance was the choice of ordering of flames. Some flame transitions were much harder than others. The sequence taught to children was designed and refined to have all of the easiest flame transitions, as well as building in difficulty for each part in turn. Furthermore, the ordering decisions could be cultural, familial, historical, political. Even if one mastered all the hardest transitions and executed a perfect series of the highest difficulty, that could be seen as arrogance, or provocation. Finally, masters of the Dance could tell a story in the weave of the steps. Every flame held multiple meanings through symbolism, idioms, or even phonetic puns. To compose poetry without saying a word: that was the true challenge of a rendition of the Eternal Dance at the highest levels.

Fortunately, his uncle had set the order and length of this play, and seven flames out of the traditional range of nine (for children) to three sets of nine (for masters) was thankfully short. His crew's singing had already provided the theme and the background, though he'd keep things simple just to avoid embarrassment given he only knew part of the rhyme. As the highest rank on a pseudo-Navy ship, he could probably ignore politics. All he needed to do was put on a strong show from beginning to end, nail the tough transitions, and figure out a finisher. Easy, right?

Zuko suppressed a wince, looked at absolutely no-one while making his way through the crowd, which was an achievement in itself, and stepped decisively to the centre of the marked off stage. Chalk markings in four concentric ellipses set his boundaries: the outer splash limit, two tighter fire jet limits, and a final zone restricting his movements to an area about three body widths wide and eight times that long. It wasn't nearly a regulation pitch, but they were on a ship. The entire crew was arrayed around the arena, keeping a safety buffer of not even an arm length. That was _really_ not regulation, but they also really didn't have the space for more. It would have to do.

Without even acknowledging the people watching, he faced the west and bowed deeply, hands in the shape of the flame. When he straightened, he separated his palms and bent bright, almost white, fire between his hands, then molded the resulting block of light in cupped hands, lowering the temperature just a tad to let oranges into the body of the flame. He absently flowed through the standard step pattern, focusing on keeping his hands always moving, suggesting with his splayed fingers a spherical cage from which the loū flames would not escape. Starting from loū was basically the worst. Zuko only hoped he did a good enough job of it. In a minor deviation from the form, he subtly flared the ball of fire in time with his heart beat.

As he neared the brazier at the far end, he split his concentration to get a hold of the heat in the coals, spun the idle flames above them quickly into a small vortex, then tossed the ball of loū into it. At the moment the two fires collided, he shifted his stance sharply but only fractionally, flaring the combined fires spectacularly, though with a care not to overdo it due to the closeness of the crowd.

Dramatically, he turned on the spot, and cut off combustion at exactly the right time to cause a pressure collapse and a rush of wind. Stepping forward, slow and deliberate in the lion-turtle pose, he pulled at the now-flameless but still burning hot embers just as the air snapped back, imparting momentum and spilling half the brazier either side of him, as he nudged it to surround about half of the course.

_Azula would have managed the entire length._

Never mind that, no time. Now that he had a bed of jun, he could breathe energy into them, keeping the flames short and temperatures appropriate for zā, not that he had a lot of experience dealing with actual cooking stove fires. Camp fires, occasionally, yes, on some of his excursions, when they lasted more than a day. He was given to understand, from the palace kitchen benders, that it was not at all the same. _Focus!_ Right, while reminiscing he'd almost completed the lion-turtle ambling form. Behind him, the blown out brazier was lazily smoking in a thin grey wisp. Ooops. Zuko pinched it cold with a twitch of his fingers he concealed in a decorative flutter of hands, while slowing down the pace even further.

He smoothly stopped at the dead centre of the elliptical, anchored his feet flat on the deck, and got into the starting pā hold. This he'd seen a lot of in the past few months, and though he hadn't actually helped the firing crew in the engine bay, it was hard not to align his practices with their work, as much of it as he could feel through two decks and steel walls. Tonight, there was no one stoking the coal and the engine was shut off: the engineers were here, watching. He made eye contact briefly, holding back a grimace, and tried not to think of how he was surely butchering their working art.

Keeping temperatures relatively low was a critical part of it: the goal was boiling water into steam, not melting or warping the steel containment in the process, and drawing the entire burn out over a long time, to stretch the fuel out. Coal was cheap in Fire Nation ports and colonies, but the amount a ship burned through still added up considerably. Usually, doing this exercise, he liked to precisely control the combustion to maximum efficiency, leaving no unnecessary by-products: that was also how he assessed the quality of combustibles from Earth Kingdom suppliers whom he couldn't trust to adhere to Fire Nation standards.

However, the Eternal Dance was not just about technical accuracy. The traditional representations of pā had black smoke, so black smoke he would produce. It would also nicely illustrate the despair at being away from a lover that he figured was probably appropriate for the song that was the theme of this Dance, unless he'd completely misjudged it or if it was referencing some kind of cultural metaphor he just hadn't been exposed to.

Ending the ritual stationary pā bending and settling into a half crouch, Zuko breathed in deeply, then dispersed the dark haze seeping from the hot pellets with a sudden exhalation which produced from his mouth twin red bursts of flame that swept the entire length of the stage either side of him. He noticed some of those on the front rows lean back, and smirked internally: his control wasn't _that_ awful. He sucked air back into his mouth, simultaneously pulling back the fire in reverse motion well before breaching the splash zone limits.

The air cleared, he proceeded through a full round of breathing exercises, while playing with the hei flames he was blowing in and out of his lips. There wasn't really any poetic value he could attach to it in context, but perhaps the initial breath counted as a sigh? He tried for languid and wanting, as well, but these kinds of feelings weren't a thing he knew much about. Questionable literature only served for so much.

Fire breathing was occasionally useful in close quarters, but bending with your tongue was mostly just not worth it. You had to be very careful not to burn yourself, for one, nor to literally dry out your throat. All fire bending children spat sparks as they started out: it was one of the first thing a pupil had to be taught out of, and for an older practitioner to lapse into it was disgraceful. Breathing fire without also spitting sparks had taken him an entire year to master.

He unfolded his legs and stood facing east, starting his penultimate sequence with a circus trick: breathing bright yellow fire into his hands clasped in the sign of the flame, and stretching it out in a trail behind his fingers as he separated them, forming great arcs of guon that spanned the entire travel of his moving routine. When he reached his starting point, he somersaulted to land facing west in a half-flex, trailing fire in a very obvious heart pattern that nevertheless he hoped looked an accidental side-effect of the jump, if for his dignity alone, and extended his arms, shooting out two jets of pure yellow light into the sky, intertwined with each other in a helix.

For a moment, it was daylight. He shifted, brought his fists to bear, and punched at the air repeatedly while marching methodically forward. Each jab ended on a full finger extension, at the tip of which he bent ngai moū in very short controlled jets of the hottest blue he could produce. Outwards, he hoped it would create the impression of blue eyes blinking, but he really hadn't had any time to rehearse or workshop the effect.

The tricky part was not allowing the ends of the bouts of flame to devolve into white, yellow, or Agni forbid, reds and oranges. He did not have the skill to do a complete localised extinguish on every jet, the gold standard he could never attain, so instead he cheated and poured energy into the moū right as the ngai blue faded, boosting it directly into pure ultraviolet light before snuffing it out invisibly by oxygen exhaustion.

Zuko finished by blasting the blazier, relighting it in the process, a symbolic beacon. He stepped back, turned around, and bowed to the east.

Well.

At least there was no booing.

He straightened, noticed the crew collectively bowing, but dismissed it as politeness. He strode over to his uncle. It was time to end this whole thing and obtain Iroh's end of the deal, in public so he couldn't wiggle out of it later with some further negotiating he wouldn't see coming, as had prompted this entire ludicrous enterprise.

"Ah," Iroh began, his eyes crinkling ever so slightly. "Very well done, nephew. For the next three days I shall play with only my own wits as companion, as agreed."

"And the answer to my question," Zuko rebutted.

"Of course."

Ah, the whispers had started. Zuko retreated to his cabin at a brisk pace.

"Magnificently done, Captain." commented one guard as he waved them off from their duties.

They could enjoy the night; he would be taking advantage of no Pai Sho to finally look into the interesting training scrolls he'd obtained from the Eastern Air Nomad Temple and planned on getting no sleep at all until the change of the watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> zuko: aha! now we observe my one superior skill: negotiation!  
> iroh: *plays him like a fiddle*  
> zuko: what the fuck just happened
> 
> also zuko: *executes a series of highly technical stunts in a single take improvised with zero notice* i'm terrible at what i do and everyone knows it


End file.
